The Northwind is a personal website and blog for the exploration of the personal interests, the adventures, the successes, and the trials of its author. You'll find subjects from history, politics, and activism to technology, media, and video games.

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Aug 21 The Ongoing Conversation

One of the things I've found it difficult to keep in touch with while writing this blog over the last couple of years is that it is in fact a conversation. This might seem like an odd thing to say given that I disabled blog comments some time ago and I rarely engage with anyone about a post in social media. It's a little less direct and obvious than that. For the most part it's a conversation with myself.

It is somehow amazing the way in which, when you put it into words, your understanding of a concept can change. In order to express something to another person in text you have to take a cognitive construct made up of reason, memories and emotion and distill it into simple language. Minds are complex, and no thought exists without a framework of experience and meaning, even if the sum of that rational and emotional knowlege is 'I love pizza'.

Sometimes the conversation is with the universe - something happens, someone else writes something on the internet and it's worth weighing in on that conversation simply to express an opinion - something diarists have understood for centuries.

This isn't to say you shouldn't immediately hop on your social media platform of choice and join in the great debate, but I appreciate that it's not always the way a conversation works.